On Her Majesty's Behalf

by Joseph Nassise

  Burke would be the first to admit that he hadn’t liked Graves all that much when he’d first met him; the man’s obsession with the undead was creepy as hell. But Burke had grown to not only like the man but trust him with his life, and he’d had to do just that during their hair-­raising escape less than two weeks ago from the secret base outside Verdun of Germany’s top ace, Baron Manfred von Richthofen.

  Given it was because of Graves that he was here at all, Burke was very happy to see him.

  A younger man with gold-­rimmed spectacles sat in the passenger seat beside Graves, a leather medical bag clutched tightly against his chest. Burke stared at him for a moment but was pretty sure he didn’t know the man.

  Graves brought the truck up parallel with the boat and parked. He sat in the cab for a moment, staring in what appeared to be fascination at the chain-­wrapped shredder twisting from its hook at the rear of the boat, then he shook himself and said something over his shoulder to someone in the cargo area, out of Burke’s view. Seconds later the canvas flaps at the back of the truck were thrown back and a squad of military police poured out over the sides, forming up around the vehicle, weapons at the ready.

  Reinforcements had arrived.

  The lieutenant in charge of the MP squad stepped forward and raised his voice over the angry talk of the crowd.

  “All right, show’s over. Back off and get back to work or you’ll be spending the night in the brig. Don’t make me tell you twice!”

  There were a few shouts from the crowd that questioned the legitimacy of the lieutenant’s parentage and a whole lot of grumbling to go along with them, but faced with the implacable stare of the lieutenant and the increased firepower his men added to the equation, the crowd finally began to break up and turn away.

  Once the dock was secured, Graves stepped out of the truck and hurried along the edge of the dock to stand opposite the shredder, his gaze locked firmly upon it.

  “So it worked?” he called over his shoulder at Burke, who was watching him with a mixture of amusement and revulsion. How the man could be so enrapt by such creatures . . .

  “More or less,” Burke replied. “I’ve got a list of suggestions that I think might help make it a bit more useful in the field.”

  Graves nodded, but Burke could tell he wasn’t really listening, his attention completely captured by the undead creature hanging off the end of the transom.

  Knowing they could talk it all over later in the debriefing, Burke turned back to find the newcomer standing in front of the truck, watching them both. When the man realized that Burke was watching him, he stepped forward and saluted.

  “Private Bankowski reporting for duty, sir.”

  The newcomer was in his midtwenties, with blond hair and blue eyes that hinted at either German or Polish ancestry. Burke eyed the leather bag the man carried. “You a doctor, Bankowski?”

  “Medic, sir. I was a doctor’s assistant before the war.”

  “Good enough. I’ve got an exhausted and potentially injured man inside the wheelhouse. I’m turning him over to your care for the time being. If he wakes up, I want you to notify me right away, clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Burke gave him a hand up onto the boat and then turned his attention to the job before him, namely, getting the shredder unloaded and on its way to Graves’s lab for further study.

  Along with the squad of MPs, the truck also contained a large iron cage, similar to those used by zookeepers to transport dangerous animals. Burke had once seen a lion being taken by train from New York to Los Angeles and it had made the journey in just such a device. The bars were round and very thick, the cage itself large enough for Burke to have lain down in.

  Unlike most cages, however, this one opened from the top, rather than from one of the four sides. Burke puzzled about it for a moment, until he realized that having it open in such a fashion would make it much easier to unload the shredder from the fishing trawler; all they would have to do is swivel the boom out over the cage and then use the winch to lower the creature inside.

  Simple and effective, just the way Burke liked it.

  Graves came hustling back down the dock at that point, and they got to work transferring the shredder to its temporary home. It was considerably more active now than it had been on the trip across the Channel, and Burke was at a loss with figuring how to subdue it when Graves suggested using the shockgun. Burke had been thinking of the weapon as purely an offensive one and it simply hadn’t occurred to him that it might have other uses. Shaking his head at his own nearsightedness, Burke picked up the weapon and used it to shock the shredder into immobility again, thereby reducing the chance that someone might get accidentally scratched or bitten by the creature as they maneuvered it into the cage.

  Everything went smoothly from that point forward. Forty minutes later the shredder was in its cage and the men were settled in the rear of the truck with Burke riding shotgun up front, ready for the long ride back to Camp Whitmore, the casualty clearing station and regional headquarters where the Military Intelligence Division was based.

  With his mission all but accomplished, Burke sat back to enjoy the ride.

  Chapter Six

  Camp Whitmore

  South of Provins

  France

  IT WAS MORE than two hundred kilometers from Calais to Provins, a trip that, even under the best of conditions, would normally take a few hours. These were not the best of conditions, of course, not even close, and so the journey took considerably longer. The road ran close to the front, and on several occasions the troops had to climb out of the cargo area while Graves carefully maneuvered the vehicle around shell craters and the occasional piece of unexploded ordnance. There was also the ever-­present threat of being dive-­bombed by a squadron of enemy aircraft patrolling behind the lines, all of which contributed to making the trip a less-­than-­ideal one.

  Not that any of that bothered Burke. There weren’t any shamblers, shredders, or other assorted undead creatures trying to eat him at the moment and that was a considerable improvement over his usual circumstances. From a tactical standpoint the mission had been a resounding success; they’d captured a shredder, rescued a fellow soldier, and made it back alive in one piece. As the gates to Camp Whitmore came into view through the windshield before him, Burke couldn’t help but smile.

  Score one for the good guys, he thought.

  The Tommy they’d rescued was still unconscious, a condition that had Burke more than a little concerned, but Doc Bankowski assured him that the Tommy’s condition was simply a result of the dehydration and sheer exhaustion that he was experiencing. Some decent food and a night’s rest should have him back on his feet in no time. Knowing Colonel Nichols would want to question the man when he awoke, Burke ordered Bankowski to escort the injured soldier to the casualty clearing station and stay with him until he regained consciousness, at which point he was to notify Colonel Nichols.

  Satisfied that he’d done all he could in that regard, Burke retired to his tent and immediately turned on the auto-­dictation machine to handle his mission report. Colonel Nichols was a stickler for getting as much information out of an operative as possible and Burke had learned to get his recollections down right away, knowing that the minor details would slip away from him with time. Practically everything they were doing was virgin territory and no one knew what detail, no matter how insignificant, might hold the key to giving them the upper hand in this seemingly never-­ending war.

  The luggage-­size device hissed and clicked and whirred for ten minutes before it beeped to tell him it was ready. When it was, he began speaking clearly and slowly, listening as the automaton at the heart of the device pecked out the letters in short bursts that reminded him of the pecking of a woodpecker on the trees back home. Just under an hour later he had eight printed pages ready to send out. He summoned a runner and directed him
to take the pages to Corporal Davis, Colonel Nichols’s adjutant, who would give them to the colonel at the appropriate time. As MID resident expert on the undead, Graves would receive a copy as well.

  Only when the runner was on his way, report in hand, did Burke turn to getting himself cleaned up from his mission. He stripped off his uniform, stiff with dried blood and seawater, and laid it aside. He’d set out a basin of water and a scrub cloth before heading out at 0-­dark hundred that morning and he used them now to clean some of the grit and grime off his body before pulling on a clean uniform.

  The very fact that he had spare water with which to clean himself showed how much things had changed since his transfer into the MID. Less than a month before he’d been on the front line with the men of the Fourth Platoon, facing daily attacks by shamblers and German infantry alike. They spent the day manning the trench and the nights sleeping in cavelike dugouts they’d excavated in the trench walls, wearing the same uniforms for weeks at a time. Wasting what little water they had on personal hygiene made no sense in those conditions; better to have something to drink than to use the water to clean something that was just going to be covered in filth again moments later.

  Ready access to clean water was not the only thing that had changed. Sure, the missions might be a bit hairier, but there was a cot to sleep on at night and three square meals a day in the officers’ mess that made up for the harrowing nature of the missions twice over.

  And let’s not forget the coffee, Burke thought. Fresh grounds every morning! Sometimes he thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

  Thoughts of the Fourth Platoon brought with them memories of his former staff sergeant, Charlie Moore, and Burke’s satisfaction with his new circumstances was quickly replaced with sadness at the thought of his missing friend. During their last mission together, Charlie had volunteered to lead the pursuing German troops away from the rest of the squad, giving them the time they needed to escort the man they’d rescued, Major Jack Freeman, back across the front lines to safety. Moore’s fate was still unknown, as was the fate of Clayton Manning, the big-­game-­hunter-­turned-­soldier who had seen the gambit as a final chance to fulfill his mission of killing Richthofen. Burke had last seen Moore behind the wheel of the lorry they had stolen, Manning in the passenger seat beside him, as they’d sped off down the road.

  I’ll meet you farther down the line, Charlie said as they’d made their good-­byes. That had been more than a week ago. Burke hadn’t yet given up hope that his friend had escaped the Germans and managed to hook up with the partisan group outside of Reims that was the intended rendezvous point, but the odds were growing slimmer with each day that passed without word.

  It had been Charlie who had saved his life by cutting off his hand just moments after it had been ravaged by a shambler’s bite; Charlie who had gotten him back to the combat aid station where he would eventually be fitted for a predecessor of the mechanical arm that he wore today; Charlie who had saved his life more times than he could count in the bleakness and horror that was life in the trenches.

  Burke knew he wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for Charlie’s efforts along the way.

  The hole in his soul that his friend used to occupy burned with an aching sense of loss that was terribly reminiscent of how he’d felt when his fiancée Mae had been accidentally killed while in the company of his half brother, Jack.

  Burke missed his friend. Missed him terribly.

  He walked over to his footlocker and dug out the half-­empty bottle of whiskey lying inside. He twisted off the cup and held the bottle up in salute.

  “Here’s to you, Charlie,” he said. “Wherever the hell you are.”

  He took a long pull; the cheap liquor burned harshly on the way down, but that was okay with Burke. It fit his mood perfectly. After a glass or two, he wouldn’t notice anyway.

  BURKE AWOKE SEVERAL hours later. He’d left the flaps closed on the tent, and the air inside felt hot and stuffy. So, too, did his head; he’d had several glasses of that less-­than-­premium-­quality sour mash before falling asleep, it seemed. He pulled on his boots, splashed some leftover water on his face from the pitcher he’d filled the basin with earlier, and stepped outside.

  The sun was going down in the west, the sunset filtered through the ever-­present haze from the constantly burning corpse fires behind the casualty clearing station. The late hour, and his rumbling stomach, reminded him that he’d had very little to eat since earlier that morning, so he headed for the officers’ mess to grab some dinner.

  Afterward, given that he didn’t have any particular duties to perform until the morning, Burke decided to drop in on Graves to see if he’d learned anything of interest from the captive shredder yet.

  The bunker complex Graves had commandeered for his so-­called laboratory was a fifteen-­minute walk from the officers’ mess. Ordinarily he would have caught a ride with a passing troop transport or staff adjutant, but today he decided not to bother.

  It turned out to be a good choice; the walk cleared his head and allowed him to get his thoughts in order. If they were going to be facing more of these creatures in the future, then he wanted to know what he was up against and Graves was one of the few ­people who might actually be able to tell him something worthwhile.

  The area Graves used as his laboratory and general workspace had started as a dugout designed to provide protection for senior staff during artillery and mortar attacks. Graves worked tirelessly to expand it to suit his needs, and now it was a warren of passageways of underground chambers where he conducted his research and experimentation.

  As Burke rounded a bend and approached the U-­shaped barrier of sandbags that surrounded the entrance to the bunker, he could see that the cast-­iron door was propped open with the empty shell casing from a German howitzer round, allowing some air to flow inside. A guard stood outside smoking a cigarette. He snapped to attention the moment he saw Burke, doing what he could to hide the smoke in his left hand while saluting with his right. Burke had to suppress a smile as he returned the salute; he had done the same thing with his own smokes more times than he could count.

  Beyond the doors was a set of steps, nineteen in all, leading down to the complex proper. Burke descended at a quickened pace; lights hadn’t been hung in the stairwell and he hated being caught in the darkness between the daylight above and the artificial lights below.

  The room at the bottom of the staircase was as long as it was wide and lit by several bare lightbulbs that hung down low from the ceiling above. The harshness of the lighting set Burke’s nerves on edge, a situation made worse when he saw what was waiting for him on the long wooden table in the center of the room.

  The shredder that his team had captured earlier that morning was lying naked on the table, its gray-­black flesh glistening in the lights. Thick leather bands crossed its body at the forehead, shoulders, chest, waist, and knees, secured at the edge of the table with metal buckles at least an inch thick. Iron manacles locked its ankles and wrists to the table.

  A thick rubber tube ran from the inside of the shredder’s left elbow to a large bucket hanging from a nearby metal rack. Another ran from its right elbow to a bucket on the floor beside the table. Other sets of tubing ran from the buckets to a spot behind the table somewhere. From that same direction came the hissing inhalations and exhalations of an iron lung. Each time the machine breathed in, some of the shredder’s black blood was pulled out of the shredder’s left arm; when it breathed out, red blood—­was that human blood?—­was pumped back in through the other side.

  Professor Graves sat at a nearby desk, his back to Burke, staring down into the eyepieces of one of his mysterious pieces of equipment and jotting notes onto a pad of paper beside him.

  “Turn the left-­hand dial to the third setting, would you please, Major?” Graves asked, without looking up from what he was doing.

  “Uh . . . okay
,” Burke replied, startled by Graves’s unexpected request and not really understanding what was being asked of him. The left-­hand dial? He didn’t see any dials, never mind one on the left. Maybe he meant. . .

  “On the control panel hanging from the left side of the table.”

  “Right.” Burke grimaced; he would have been perfectly happy staying on the opposite side of the room, away from the table and the shredder it contained.

  Stepping closer, Burke saw the control panel that Graves was talking about. It wasn’t anything fancy, just a ­couple of switches and a single dial cobbled together onto a flat sheet of metal about a foot square, hanging by two hooks from the edge of the table. Multicolored wires ran from the back of the panel and around behind the table, presumably to the iron lung that was still breathing in and out every few seconds.

  As Burke reached out toward the dial, the shredder on the table opened its eyes and hissed at him.

  “Aaagh!” Burke jumped in surprise. The damned thing was awake!

  “Come, come, Major,” Graves scolded him impatiently, looking up at last. “It’s strapped down quite securely; it isn’t going anywhere.”

  Burke scowled in Graves’s direction. “You’ve tested the straps? You’re positive it can’t break free?”

  “Positive? Well, no, not exactly. But I’m pretty sure.”

  Burke just stared at him.

  After a moment filled only with the snarls of the shredder and the hiss of the electronic lung, Graves said, “Perhaps you should let me do that then, yes?”

  “Be my guest, Professor.”

  Burke stepped out of the way, letting Graves handle whatever needed adjusting. The shredder couldn’t move its head thanks to the wide strap of leather running across its forehead, but that didn’t stop it from following the professor with eyes that showed a much greater sense of awareness than its shambler cousins and that made Burke distinctly uncomfortable. One of the few advantages they had in fighting the shamblers was the fact that the shamblers operated on an instinctive level and as a result were entirely predictable. You knew exactly what a shambler would do because it did the same thing every time. These new shredders, though . . .